KARACHI: The government on Thursday invited expressions of interest from potential bidders by June 3 to sell its stake in Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), in line with the International Monetary Fund’s requirement to privatize loss-making state-owned enterprises (SOEs), according to a notice on the privatization ministry’s website.
The fresh bids have been called a week after the Privatization Commission Board on April 17 approved pre-qualification criteria for selecting prospective buyers for the divestment of the government’s 51 to 100 percent shares in Pakistan International Airlines Corporation Ltd. (PIACL).
“In the last financial year (FY24), PIA served approximately 4 million passengers across 30 destinations, carrying out 268 flights per week,” the ministry said in the notice aimed at attracting investors.
This marks Pakistan’s second attempt to raise funds through the privatization of the national carrier, which earlier this month reported its first operational profit of $33.48 million in over two decades.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s previous attempt to offload a 60 percent stake in the airline failed last year, attracting only a single bid from a real estate firm that quoted well below the asking price of over $300 million.
In a bid to avoid a repeat, the government said it may offer prequalified bidders incentives such as exemption from sales tax on the induction of aircraft through lease or purchase and additional support to improve PIA’s balance sheet, including indemnification, transfer of certain liabilities and coverage for tax and legal claims, according to the notice.
Pakistan, which has repaid most of its $26 billion in external debt this year through an IMF loan and billions of dollars in rollovers from allies such as China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had to shift nearly all of PIA’s legacy debt to the government’s books after bidder concerns derailed the previous privatization attempt.
The cash-strapped South Asian nation also plans to privatize PIA’s Roosevelt Hotel Corporation in New York.
The privatization board last week finalized its recommendations on the transaction structure, which will be presented to the Cabinet Committee on Privatization for approval.
The ministry added that demand in Pakistan’s under-served aviation market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 6.2 percent over the next four years through FY29.
Pakistan seeks fresh bids for PIA stake sale by June 3
https://arab.news/rpwhx
Pakistan seeks fresh bids for PIA stake sale by June 3
- The government aims to sell as much as 100 percent shares of the airline after a failed attempt last year
- It may offer incentives like tax exemption on aircrafts purchase and liability transfers to attract investors
Pakistan’s Afghan salvo risks turning ‘open war’ into long crisis
- Nuclear-armed Pakistan has a formidable military of 660,000 active personnel, backed by a fleet of 465 combat aircraft
- But the Taliban have the option to lean on insurgent groups like the TTP and the BLA to move beyond border skirmishes
KARACHI: Weeks after the Taliban’s lightning offensive in 2021 wrested control of Afghanistan from a US-led military coalition, Pakistan’s then intelligence chief flew into the capital Kabul for talks, where the serving lieutenant general told a reporter: “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.”
Five years on, Islamabad — long seen as a patron of the Taliban — is locked in its heaviest fighting with the group, which Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif described on Friday (February 27) as an “open war.”
The turmoil means that a wide swathe of Asia — from the Gulf to the Himalayas — is now in flux, with the United States building up a military deployment against Afghanistan’s neighbor Iran even as relations between Pakistan and arch rival India remain on edge after four days of fighting last May.
At the heart of the conflict with Afghanistan is Pakistan’s accusation that the Afghan Taliban provides support to militant groups, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), that have wreaked havoc across inside the South Asian country.
The Afghan Taliban, which has previously fought alongside the TTP, denies the charge, insisting that Pakistan’s security situation is its internal problem.
The disagreement is a reflection of starkly incompatible positions taken by both sides, as Pakistan expected compliance after decades of support to the Taliban, which did not see itself beholden to Islamabad, analysts said.
“We all know that the government in Pakistan supported the Taliban, the Afghan Taliban for many years, in the 90s and the 2000s, and provided havens to them during the period where the US and NATO were in Afghanistan.
So there’s a very close relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan,” said Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh and an Afghanistan expert.
“It’s really surprising and shocking to many of us to see how quickly this relationship deteriorated,” she said.
Although tensions have simmered along their rugged 2,600-km (1,615-mile) frontier for months, following clashes last October, Friday’s fighting is notable because of Pakistan’s use of warplanes to hit Taliban military installations instead of confining the attacks to the militants it allegedly harbors.
These include targets deep inside the country in Kabul, as well as the southern city of Kandahar, the seat of Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, according to Pakistan military spokesman Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry.
The clashes are unlikely to end there.
“I think in the immediate aftermath, I think hostilities will subside. There will be, I hope there will be a ceasefire through mediation. But I do not see these tensions subsiding in the foreseeable future,” said Abdul Basit, an expert on militancy and violent extremism at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan has a formidable military of 660,000 active personnel, backed by a fleet of 465 combat aircraft, several thousand armored fighting vehicles and artillery pieces.
Across the border, the Afghan Taliban has only around 172,000 active military personnel, a smattering of armored vehicles and no real air force.
But the battle-hardened group, which took on a phalanx of Western military powers in 2001 and outlasted them, has the option to lean on insurgents like the TTP and the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), moving beyond border skirmishes.
Based in Pakistan’s largest and poorest province of Balochistan that borders both Iran and Afghanistan, the BLA has been at the center of a decades-long insurgency, which in recent years has staged large coordinated attacks.
Pakistan has long accused India of backing the insurgents, a charge repeatedly denied by New Delhi, which has retained a robust military deployment along the border since last May.
Although a raft of countries with influence — including China, Russia, Turkiye and Qatar — have indicated an openness to help mediate the conflict, all such efforts have been met with limited success so far.
